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Photo by Katerina Pavlyuchkova on Unsplash

Picture this: you come across an interesting paper evaluating the impact of a promising intervention, conducted at an institution like your own. However, as you attempt to access it, you hit a paywall. Luckily you manage to get access through a colleague and see that the intervention shows promise and you decide you’d like to try and conduct a similar evaluation in your setting. But as you look to follow the researcher’s process, you realise you cannot access the code or data. You see that they’ve conducted the analysis with a method you’re not familiar with using subscription-only software. You’re left wondering how you’d perform such an analysis on a similar dataset from your institution.

The solution to these barriers lies in open science, a movement promoting transparency and accessibility in research. TASO is committed to this cause and today, we’re publishing information on our approach to open science practices. 

At its core, this approach is about making research and data accessible to all, breaking down the barriers that hinder progress. As the rise of digital tools and platforms has made data-sharing and collaboration easier than ever before, what began as a push for open access to publications has evolved. It has now become a comprehensive movement that encompasses all aspects of the research process. Today, key principles of open science include pre-registration of studies, open access to publications, open data and the use of open-source software. These principles foster collaboration, enhance reproducibility and accelerate discovery. 

Consider, for example, the benefits of sharing code. Imagine a researcher who analyses an open dataset. By sharing their code publicly on platforms like GitHub, other researchers can easily access and review the analysis. This openness allows peers to identify potential flaws, suggest improvements and even adapt the analysis for their own studies in future. As a result, the original research is validated and refined, while new analysis is also built on top of it, accelerating the pace of research across the field.   

The sector is in a strong position to apply the principles of open science. Institutions like the University of Manchester and UCL offer practical guidance on applying the principles of open science, while tools like the Open Science Framework and GitHub make it straightforward for anyone to pre-register and share their research. 

At TASO, we aim to embody these principles, while making them easy for the sector to follow. All our resources and research are accessible to anyone interested in our work. Our practice of pre-registering studies – which details our research plans before they begin – helps prevent selective reporting and increases the reliability of our findings. Recently, we have started to share our code on GitHub, written with freely available software such as R, which allows others to scrutinise and build upon our work.

We will continue to expand our application of open science principles. We aim to make our research process – from data collection to analysis and dissemination – as transparent and accessible as possible. This includes refining our open data-sharing practices and improving the accessibility of our publications. 

Imagine returning to our initial scenario, but this time, it’s an ideal world where open science is the norm. You effortlessly access any paper you’re interested in, free of charge. The data and code are readily available, allowing you to follow the research process step-by-step, replicate the study, or even build upon it. This is the promise of open science: a more inclusive, transparent and collaborative higher education research and evaluation landscape.

By embracing open science as a sector, we can transform not only how we conduct research, but also how we share and use it, building a more robust and transparent research environment for the sector. Collectively, we must commit to the principles of open science and ensure that our research is accessible, reproducible and impactful.